“Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations.”
Nay, the metaphysician himself does not altogether escape. Piero de Cosimo is accused of being one and repudiates the idea:[456]
“Not I, Messer Greco; a philosopher is the last sort of animal I should choose to resemble. I find it enough to live, without spinning lies to account for life. Fowls cackle, asses bray, women chatter, and philosophers spin false reasons—that’s the effect the sight of the world brings out of them.”
This perception of the Idol of the Cave, and the whole trend of Eliot’s argument is evidence that the pragmatic attitude existed some time before it was so vividly and enduringly defined by Professor James.
Since these various changes bring about no complete break with the satiric tradition, we may expect to find the connecting links with both the remote and the immediate past as much in evidence as are the features of novelty. Peacock’s indebtedness was to the Athenian comedy, and Lytton’s to the near-contemporary Byron. Mrs. Gaskell had Jane Austen and Crabbe and the whole gallery of eighteenth-century village vignettes for her humors of rural life; while her Mary Barton probably reached back to Sybil, as it did forward to the line of economic novels. Thackeray had a large store to draw on for his burlesques, as did Lytton and Butler for their pseudo-Utopias.
Nor is there any abrupt termination to satiric affairs as the Victorians left them at the end of the century. The years stand as sign posts along the way, and not as barriers across it. The changes they call our attention to were less patent to those in and by whom they were working than to us with our perspective. From our moderate distance we are able to discern not only the evolutionary process but some of its results.
In a national award the satiric prize would undoubtedly go to the French, whose genius for satire not only gave them preëminence among the peoples in that line, but gave their satire precedence over their other literature. But with this exception, the total effect of satire in the Victorian novel ranks artistically with the highest at large, and surpasses some other elements of the fiction itself. For the nineteenth-century novel is undeniably didactic, and therefore, while it gains in point, significance, and intellectual interest, it loses in romantic interest and esthetic purity. It is here that satire becomes its salvation, for by giving much of the criticism a humorous turn it counteracts the didactic effect, enhances delight, and, to readers of a sensitive response, makes a point that would not be sharpened by increased vehemence. No invective against the Countess de Saldar could be so illuminating as Lady Jocelyn’s thorough relish of her as a specimen. It is of a piece with Mr. Bennet’s enjoyment of Collins and Wickham;[457] with Lamb’s avowal that he would rather lose the legacy Dorrell cheated him out of than “be without the idea of that specious old rogue;” and with the dismay of Don Antonio over the restored sanity of Don Quixote.[458] It is the secret of Trollope’s charm, as Hawthorne indicated when he described the impression of those “beef and ale” novels,—
“* * * as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of.”
It would have been a saving grace to many of the dramatis personæ if they could have shared the experience of a romantically inclined youth who, after building an air castle in which he figured first as a conquering hero and then as a magnanimous patron, suddenly “came to:”[459]
“And then he turned upon himself with laughter, discovering a most wholesome power, barely to be suspected in him yet.”